The complaints from South Philly High's Asian students

Via Helen Gym at Young Philly Politics:

South Philadelphia High School is not a safe place for us.

We are targeted because we are Asian immigrants. Every day we face taunts and violence. It hurts when we are attacked by other students. It hurts more when school staff ignore, deny, or cover up the racial attacks against us.

For the last three days we have chosen to boycott our school in order to get a real education about how to ensure our safety. This is what we have found.

On Thursday, attacks against us happened throughout the day both inside and outside of school. Adults in the school are supposed to care for us and to make us safe. Instead this is what happened. School staff:

Allowed large groups of 15-20 students to wander through the building for over four hours. These students were reported to be looking into classrooms for targets of their attacks;

Overrode one security guard’s efforts to keep a large group of students from the second floor where they did not have classes and purposefully allowed them to go running through the halls;

Ignored Asian students’ fears about going to the lunchroom following these clear signs of trouble in the building;

Forced Asian students to follow a security guard to the lunchroom where they were attacked and beaten by a crowd of students in front of several adult staff;

Failed to call all the parents of injured students for several hours after the attacks;

Refused to allow some Asian students who were seeking shelter and safety in the school at the end of the school day to stay at the school, until community advocates called 911 and arrived on the scene;

Forced Asian students who had been assaulted to leave the school building even though they were hurt and frightened;

Discounted Asian students’ fears of walking home and to their transit stops;

Directed Asian students into the streets where crowds of students had gathered and where immediately afterward they were assaulted;

Neglected to call the students and families who were victimized by the attacks to either check on their well-being or to get a full report of what happened to them;

Failed to conduct a full investigation of what happened;

Downplayed the seriousness of the attacks until they were reported in the media;

Disregarded students’ and families’ fears and recklessly called on students to return to school before even investigating what happened on Thursday; and

Refused to accept responsibility for the mistakes of school staff and administration on that day and placed all the blame on the student attackers.

Most of the students at South Philadelphia High School – Asian, African American, Latino and white – are just like us. They are trying to get an education in a school where they do not feel safe or respected. We are calling on the adults in the school and in the School District to take responsibility for the unsafe environment of South Philadelphia High School that makes it hard for all of us to learn there.

I see knee-jerk black-against-Asian racism around town on a nearly daily basis. It's a bit of an elephant in the room when it comes to Philadelphia race relations, I think. Arlene Ackerman, Ed.D., the CEO of the Philadelphia public schools, is quoted in the article there as saying, "In our rush to sensationalize this latest incident, let us not as adults criminalize or victimize any racial group of students with a stroke of the pen or careless words of blame and fingerpointing." With this comment, at best she's deliberately ignoring the racial foundation of the problem. (As a community member testified: "It is a racial issue not because of the race of the attackers. It is a racial issue because students were targeted for attack because they are Asian. Throughout an entire school day, Asian students were randomly attacked, and school staff failed to protect them.") Or, worse, Ackerman is denying the reality of the experiences that the Asian immigrant students at South Philadelphia High School have had, with the excuse that the incidents haven't been reported. But she can hardly claim plausible deniability when the victimized kids point out that the school's safety manager has systematically refused to file incident reports for the express purpose of minimizing the number of incidents recorded.

Where does the buck stop? Ackerman wants it made clear that it's not her fault, because she never heard about the problems. The school is saying that it's not their fault, because the "attacks" are mere roughhousing and the Asian kids are making a mountain out of a molehill, and anyway the Asian kids started it.

Got that? All the adults are blaming the children. The school and district leadership are refusing to own their failures, and instead they're alternatively blaming the victims and denying the truth of their experiences. When a parent does that to a kid, you end up with an adult who had a lousy model for parenting and will have some issues to overcome when they have their own kids. When a school does that to a community, you end up with a whole city of adults who perpetuate the violence, racism, and dysfunctional inter-racial relations that it taught them as children.